10/28/10 a scar


saw a woman at work today, someone visiting the courthouse on a personal matter, who had the most beautiful scar I think I’ve ever seen. She was wearing a sleeveless dress on the coldest day so far this fall. We hadn’t spoken, but had only made eye contact; she slowly turned her shoulder toward me, leaning on her chair, as if she wanted to show me something, and there it was, about the size of a child’s outspread hand, a keloid with feathered fibers going this way and that in a kind of orderly entropy, that reminded me of tendrils of frost on a winter window, or the crystalline formations on the inside of a geode, or the plumes on the ancient brown wallpaper at my grandmother’s house when I was growing up. A strange, old beauty. And whatever had caused her scar, whatever fleshly trauma had occurred—accident or act of violence, had also excavated the outer third of her deltoid muscle. I’m not glorifying that event or saying that it didn’t hurt, or that it was a good thing or that she wouldn’t be better off if it hadn’t happened.



But there was the fact of the scar, the way the universe did its job of repaving, resurfacing the event, her body healed, somewhat, and left a picture to commemorate something. And it got me thinking again about what we find beautiful and what we don’t (perhaps she was exhibiting it to let the world know about her pain), and how the universe resurfaces our experiences, how there are layers, how there is beauty if we find it, if we look for it, if we admit it. Who is she now with the scar? What would she tell me, if I had had the time to have a conversation?